Women and Other Monsters

by Bernard J Schaffer

  “Is she still on the schedule or not?”

  He sighed and stood up, wiping the spot on the bar where he’d leaned. “Yeah. She’s supposed to be here in another hour.”

  I spent the next hour biting my nails. Waiting. Ignoring the other dancers until they cursed at me and called me names when they walked past. Every time the door opened, I expected her to come walking in, dragging her little suitcase. At that point, I didn’t even care if she walked right past me and didn’t say a word. I just wanted to know she was alright.

  Her shift came and went. I hung around until closing time. Right before he turned off the lights, Glenn looked at me and said, “She’s doing you a favor.”

  ***

  I figured out why cops like donut shops. There’s nothing else open at five in the morning. When you’ve been sitting in a car staring at the same building for hours on end, you crave mass quantities of caffeine and sugar.

  The Hotel Montreal was a graveyard filled with dark windows and quiet stairwells. The only car in its parking lot was a rusted Pinto with busted out windows. Stray cats prowled across the pavement, circling the hotel’s perimeter like they were defending it from rival gangs. I ate the last glazed donut and took another sip of coffee, feeling my eyes begin to close on their own when someone came down the sidewalk.

  I recognized the black trench-coat and ponytail as he entered the hotel’s gate, passing the empty pool. Even under the parking lot’s pale fluorescent lights, he didn’t look pasty or tired anymore. Blake looked delighted, as if he were full of energy he could barely keep from skipping. He crouched low and sprung into the air toward the roof of the building.

  I stuck my head out of the car window and watched him float down onto the third-floor balcony’s hand-rail. He touched down softly and crouched for a moment, the wind flapping his coat. Hot coffee soaked through my pants and seared the skin of my lap before I even realized I dropped the damned cup. I couldn’t bring myself to look away as he stepped down and went into his hotel room.

  ***

  I waited until the next morning, when the sun was shining brightly overhead and the hotel maids were pushing rickety metal carts along the hallways.

  The blinds to Blake’s room had been duct taped to the borders of the window, and I could see nothing from the outside. My driver’s license fit nicely inside the door’s frame, and I was a able to slide it against the lock. After a few quick jiggles, the handle popped. The room was totally dark as I shut the door and waited for my eyes to adjust.

  The bed was empty. I moved down the hallway, creeping silently toward the bathroom, when my knee slammed into the corner of a wooden coffin shoved between the bed and wall. I had to cover my mouth and hop around on one foot until the urge to scream passed.

  The coffin must have weighed over four hundred pounds. I shoved the bed out of the way and wedged myself against the wall, pushing with my legs until the damn thing moved. Finally, I got it close to the window. I tore away the curtains, spilling light into the room. “All right, you bloodsucking bastard. Time to do some tanning.”

  I grabbed the coffin’s lid to lift it, but it was sealed tight, locked from inside and refusing to budge. I guess after a few thousand years of being hunted by every angry villager with a flaming torch and pitchfork, you start locking your coffin lid.

  It was a little while before I finally stopped sulking and decided I needed a new plan. It took me a half-hour to put the room back together, but by the time I left, I knew what to do.

  ***

  Joe does not wave to me when I come into his parent’s natural foods store. We haven’t spoken since I sold him a dozen of my mother’s penicillin pills and told him they were OxyContin. He looks at me sideways when I walk up to the counter where he is counting out long, shriveled beef strips, and he says, “What do you want?”

  “Dude, I need your help.”

  “I don’t have any money, Rob.”

  “I don’t need money. I need advice. I have a question that is kind of out of the ordinary.”

  He holds up one of the strips of meat and says, “See this? It’s dried deer penis. People grind it up into tea, but others eat it like its beef jerky. I’m used to crazy. So go ahead and hit me with your best shot.”

  “I need to harness the power of the sun.”

  He considers me for a moment, then says, “Why?”

  “I’m trying to kill a vampire, but I can’t get him into the sunlight.”

  “Cool,” he says. He picks up a bottle of Vitamin D and rattles the pills around inside the container. “Here, give him a few of these. That should work.”

  I slide the pills back, “I can’t give him vitamins, dude. He doesn’t have a cold. I need the equivalent of real, raw sunlight.”

  “That is crazy.”

  “Can you help me or not?” Our eyes lock across the counter until he finally sighs and gets up from his seat. He tells me to follow him and leads me past aisles of brightly labeled products toward the back of the store. The shelves are filled with plants and roots marked with hand-written index cards.

  He whispers, “It’s madness to try and harness the power of the sun. What would you want to do with it, if such a thing were possible?”

  “Drink it, and force him to bite me.”

  This amuses him at first, but then he snaps his fingers and begins rifling through the contents on the shelf. “The amount of actual Vitamin D inside even a whole bottle of pills is miniscule compared to one single sunbeam. What you’re really looking for is electromagnetic radiation and ultraviolet light. Of course, it’s not really possible to consume either of those, so we have the next best thing. Here it is.” He removes a clear tankard of green-colored fluid from the shelf and shakes it. The contents look clumpy, like mashed up broccoli floating in a dirty fish tank. I take a whiff and recoil, pinching my nose.

  He hands me the bottle and says, “This is pure chlorophyll. Black market stuff. Not the cheap shit you get out of the magazines. You have to be really careful with this. Use it in very small doses and make sure you are near a bathroom when you drink it. If you start puking or pooping your pants, it’s working.”

  “Is this all you have?” I ask. “It looks like spinach water.”

  “Just drink it. That’s not your main problem, anyway. Vampire’s pick their victims. You can’t just walk up and ask him to bite you.”

  “How do you know all this?” I ask.

  “I loved Anne Rice before she became a Catholic and went crazy.”

  “Fair enough,” I say. “I was thinking I’d just hang out where he lives and wait for him to get hungry.”

  “No,” he says. “Vampires don’t have regular sex, but they get off by drinking blood. They have to desire you. There has to be something about you that turns them on.”

  He sees the look of confusion on my face, and says, “Figure out a way to turn this guy on and make yourself have sexy blood.”

  I look down at the bottle and say, “Sexy blood….ok. Thanks.”

  ***

  I poured half a bottle of vodka into my mouth for courage, and started toward Blake’s door. The vodka did not sit well with the three tablespoons of minced garlic and half bottle of Joe’s black market chlorophyll already in my stomach. My insides turned watery and I worried I’d begin erupting from both ends before I even had a chance to meet Blake.

  Sunshine’s face waits for me behind every thought, helping me overcome any fear, any pain. I gritted my teeth and braced against the wall to knock. “Room service!”

  “Come in. It is open.”

  I found him sitting on the bed, waiting with his arms crossed. He said he’d known someone had been in his room earlier, and that I was either very foolish or very brave. “I had planned on hunting you by your scent tonight. Now you are an intruder and a spoil sport.”

  “Sorry if I disturbed you,” I said. “But the gift I have for you simply can’t wait.”

  “And what gift is that, mortal?”

  “Me.
I figured, how often does one of the undead get room service? Tonight’s your lucky night”

  Blake looked me up and down, smiling thinly, “It thinks it is a clever little thing, doesn’t it?”

  “Actually, can I use your bathroom?” I said. I hurried down the hall and locked the door, controlling the urge to vomit as I removed two syringes from my pocket. I cranked the tap and held onto the sink, trying to stop swaying, hoping the room would stop spinning. After splashing a little water on my face, I rolled up my sleeve and tied off.

  I hadn’t shot up in three years and the veins didn’t pop like they used to. I tapped until a nice blue one finally showed up, and put in the first needle. These syringes weren’t filled with heroin, though. This was baptism-grade holy water, drawn straight from the font outside of St. Luke’s. I flexed my fist, making sure the water was circulating through my veins before I untied.

  I injected the second one into my neck and had to rub the skin vigorously until the bleeding stopped.

  By the time I came back out, I could barely see Blake’s curious expression through my blurred vision. He was leaning against the wall and said, “I am not sure what this little game is you are playing, but I grow tired of it quickly.”

  I held out both arms and said, “Then bon appétit.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “You are throwing yourself at me like some eager schoolgirl. There is nothing about you I find remotely interesting, and I dislike sluts. Show yourself out. If you return here, I’ll pluck out your eyes and tongue and leave you in an alleyway for the cats.”

  “I was afraid this might happen,” I said, reaching behind my back for the handle of my mother’s butcher knife.

  He smirked at the sight of it. “Do you seriously think you can injure me with that?”

  “It isn’t for you,” I said, slashing my wrist open and spraying blood at his face. “Come and get it.”

  He leapt so quickly that I was pinned under him before I realized he’d moved. His mouth was wrapped around the wound on my wrist, devouring it hungrily. I punched him in the face and screamed, “My neck! Get my neck!”

  He swatted my hand away and wrenched his mouth from the open wound on my wrist. “I have had enough of your games. Now you will die.”

  He lunged for my neck and as he latched on. I was momentarily lost in the sweet agony of him sucking me, draining me, so that I could do little more than surrender. My eyes became too heavy to keep open and numbness took over my body. It was then that Blake let go of me and clawed at his throat like he was trying to tear something out of it. “What did you do?” he gasped.

  Blake stumbled backwards, trying to get away from me. I found the strength to grab knife and lunged, jamming it into his ear. “Die, you bloodsucking maggot! Die! Die!” I stabbed him until the knife became too blood-slick to hold.

  “You want to know how it feels, fucker?” I bit him in the neck as hard as I could, tearing his skin with my front teeth like I was chewing though a stringy piece of roast beef. His blood poured into my mouth and flooded my throat, choking me until I toppled over, swallowed by darkness. I felt myself drifting away from life in a warm, deep red sea, and was content.

  Except, it didn’t last.

  I came to a little while later in Blake’s hotel room, covered in dried blood. There was a red trail going toward the door. I stumbled to my feet and followed the footprints, grabbing the doorknob to turn it, but it snapped off in my hands. I looked down at the chunk of metal for a moment and tossed it aside, pulling the door open and wincing at the horrifically bright light from the sun coming over the horizon. It burned like an open flame and I could not stand to even glimpse at the red sky.

  Blake’s bloody footprints went toward the landing, and one remained on the hand rail above the parking lot where he’d jumped.

  The odor of hair mousse overwhelmed me. I realized that scent lead to the smell of an undead vampire hiding behind a dumpster in an alleyway two blocks away. “What the hell?” I whispered. As I spoke, my tongue touched the tip of my long, sharp teeth. Holy shit. I squinted into the sky and said, “Blake? Can you hear me?”

  “What do you want?” he said. He sounds like he is shivering.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Well, I feel fabulous. In fact, I feel like giving you the ass-kicking of your worthless immortal lifetime, you pony-tail wearing pussy.” I looked down over the balcony at the twenty foot drop. The mewling in his voice was music to my ears. I took a running leap over the railing and dove into the cool morning air. All I could think was how freaking awesome Sunshine would think this was if she could see it.

  Cold Comforts

  The steel tray’s surface was cold against Susan’s skin. She lifted her head to look down the long row of gurneys lined up like cars stalled in freeway traffic, but the passengers on these vehicles would never arrive anywhere.

  Greg appeared dressed in mint green scrubs and passed her gurney slowly. Someone started to giggle. Susan saw the pretty redheaded nurse that worked the nightshift sit up from the far end of the row, calling out to Greg. He climbed onto her gurney and pushed her backwards, the two of them disappearing among the dead.

  Susan awoke clutching her blankets and looked around the bedroom, her mind slowly reconnecting to reality. This was the bedroom she shared with her husband for ten years. Streetlight pierced the blinds and reflected on a framed picture of them on their honeymoon. Her dream dissolved, leaving her with only a feeling of lingering dread that she could not resolve. She lifted the phone from the nightstand and dialed the morgue. It only rang once and Greg answered.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  She thought for a second. “I had a bad dream about the baby again.”

  “Oh. Are you okay?”

  “Do you think they’ll put me on the midnight shift if I ask? I think it would be better for us. We could sleep in all day together and eat breakfast at four in the afternoon. We could go to midnight movies on our days off and stroll through town until sunrise, living like vampires. It would be fun.”

  “I’m pretty sure the hospital doesn’t need an overnight billing clerk. I told you I put in for a transfer to dayshift.”

  She listened to him shuffling papers and said, “You sound busy. I’ll let you go. I love you.”

  “Okay. Get some sleep.”

  The baby was stillborn. They’d decided on a name as soon as the doctor told them it would be a little girl. Her name was stenciled on the bedroom door next to theirs. It was etched into a small grave marker at Whitechapel Memorial Cemetery.

  Sometime after the service, Greg had swiped a coat of white paint across the name on the door. She watched him carry the disassembled pieces of the crib out and when he shut the door, it was never opened again. There were times late at night when she put her forehead against that door and imagined the bright walls inside, decorated with balloons and hearts.

  After a year passed, she became convinced it was time to try again. One night, Susan slid against her husband and started playing between his legs, rousing him from sleep. By the time he was awake, she was already on top of him, guiding him inside of her.

  “No, wait,” he whispered. “Let me get on top.” The two of them rolled over and he told her to try not to move.

  “Why?”

  “Stop talking.”

  “Wait. Slow down. It’s been a long time, I-”

  “Stop talking,” he hissed.

  “Greg! You’re hurting me.”

  He reared back on his heels and said, “What is your problem?”

  She pulled away from him and said, “I wanted you to be gentle.”

  “Yeah, well, you ruined it,” he said.

  ***

  Susan drove to the hospital, waving to the security guard as she entered. The guard asked if it wasn’t a little late to be doing billing and she told him that she had left somethin
g in her office. She thought she’d surprise Greg with a cup of coffee. Would he mind not telling him she was here? Of course not, he said. I wish my wife was more like you.

  The main lobby upstairs had been carpeted and decorated with expensive looking paintings. Plaques celebrating staff achievements adorned the walls. Susan entered the elevator and pressed B. The doors re-opened to polyurethane concrete floors and aluminum wall-paneling that distorted her reflection like funhouse mirrors.